My Friends Hang Their Heads

Why do my friends
hang their heads and whisper,
'He has become a fool'?
Because I fell in love
with a golden light
gushing from my chest
and gave up dreaming.
I did not mold my secret
splendor into form
as others do,
cherishing a face.
I let the spume of pure
awareness aerate the night
with stars
and flow as sap through
stems in gardens, East and West.
And I breathed that fragrance
into your body too,
into the body of creation,
a luminosity so fine
it makes stones pulse
softly.
Pressed from the infinitesimal
seed in the pit of my darkness,
this un-created bliss
is less than nothing, yet makes
atoms spin in the rose
and holds the galaxy to its
vow of silence.
I know you'd like to learn
the name of this perfume:
it's called 'Annihilation.'
But we won't ruin beauty
with any more words,
neither 'Christ' nor 'Shiva'
nor 'Kiss of the Serpent Goddess.'
We won't even say 'He' or 'She.'
Fools have been naming this
honey in the hollow
for ten thousand years,
but names only separate
the sweetness
from who we are.
Of course the nectar I'm
speaking of is Love,
but even this word is
too heavy
for the wings of death,
too loud for darkness
to whisper in the space
beyond waking and sleep.
I will not say anything more
about the passion
that beats midnight into
rhythmic incandescence,
stirs yearning in the vacuum,
trembles possibility
into Being.

Persian miniature by Mahmoud Farschian